Antonello Zappadu wearing his faithful camera across the shoulder. Above: Ecuador, the volcanoes trail. Below: Bandits in Sardinia. The photos have been shot twenty years apart: one dates to November 1973, in Pattada (Sassari); the other to July 1993, in Orgosolo (Nuoro)   PORTRAIT OF A PRESS PHOTOGRAPHER by Andrea Frigo   There is one line of work that many rank among the most fascinating there are to choose from, and that is photo reporting. Whether this commonplace has any grounds we cannot say, but we can say this much of photo reporting: it is a difficult and exacting undertaking that presupposes a wide-ranging array of assets, among which intuition and curiosity&emdash;quite essential to the image hunter&emdash;as well as a good overall culture, a fat stock of sources and friends in all walks of life, and a willing disposition to travel and wake up at any time of night, not to mention a congenial personality and a full mastery of the technique necessary to capture the impossible image. A photo is therefore what a good press photographer can be esteemed by, just as a book is for a writer and a track record for an athlete. We have come to Sardinia to meet with 43- year-old Antonello Zappadu, a freelance, frontline press photographer who has taken up the profession early on in life byfollowing in the footsteps oh his father, RAI journalist Mario Zappadu. Atfifteen, Antonello turned out a reportage covering the Sardinian-banditry phenomenon, and in the early seventies e started worktng with the Sardinian daily paper L'Unione Sarda. A set of photos he tater shot for the Associated Press, for UK Press, and for ANSA got him worldwide exposure and kindled in him a passionfor travel, as he soon developed a keen interest in scoping the world to bring out adventuresome reportage series. In the summertime, on the other hand, you'll catch him VIP hunting across the Costa Smeralda: his insider knowledge of everv nook and cranny along the coast enables him to beat the competition afforded bv myriad other paparazzi who regularlyftock in to get the seasons most scandal-making photo. There is not one show-business personalitv who escapes being caught on film by Antonello Zappadu. Let us turn back to his passionfor travel now. (Featured in this article are some of the best photos he ever shot.) India, 1982, touches off his traveling bouts, and isfollowed by Moscow for the death of Leonid Brezhnev. A few years after that he ranged the vast North American continent, and in 1988 he covered the dramatic 38th-parallel situation in South Korea, cropping up in Hiroshima that same year to report on the 50 years that had elapsed since the Americans had dropped the atomic bomb. He set off in 1989 on the lookout for the last-known cannibals, the Aucas of Ecuador, and to this place he traveled again in 1992 and yet another time in 1997 to cover the Cordillera del Condor conflict in the Andes. But the episode that made Zappadu actually famous to Italians took place eightyears ago, when he and family friend Graziano Mesina took part in the effort to free Farouk Kassam, the young boy whom Anonima Sarda had kidnapped and held captive for a drawn-out period. A live TVannouncement aired on TGl informing viewers that the boy had been freed through the effort of Mesina, Zappadu, and the RAI correspondent who got the scoop.